Richard Blanco says he still can’t believe how much his life has changed since he read his poem “One Today” at U.S. President Barack Obama’s second inauguration in 2013. After his appearance, he received thousands of emails from people who appreciated his descriptions of hardworking Americans and immigrants, including his parents, and his vision of “All of us as vital as the one light we move through.”
“I could tell from their messages that [my reading] was probably the first time they had ever encountered a living poet writing in a voice and a language that they understood, feeling like they belonged to America,” says Mr. Blanco. “Some of them wouldn’t even dare to call it a poem. They were like, ‘We loved your speech.’”
Mr. Blanco’s impact – as the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve as an inaugural poet (and the youngest, at that time) – also attracted the attention of the Academy of American Poets. Together, he and the academy created the position of education ambassador – which he still holds – to help promote the academy’s free resources for teachers and students.
Why We Wrote This
Before he became a poet, Richard Blanco trained as a civil engineer. Now, he shares his poetry – about hardworking people like his Cuban immigrant parents – in schools.
Mr. Blanco’s parents fled poverty and oppression in Cuba and emigrated to the United States, after spending time in Spain, where he was born. Both parents worked hard to provide for their two sons, and his mother emphasized the importance of education. Yet “as a working-class immigrant kid in Miami who went to a very poor parish school, I didn’t have a lot of access to the arts, and I didn’t meet a living poet until I was in college,” he says. “I’m driven to give students the opportunity to encounter poetry at a young age – poetry enriches lives, makes us more aware and empathetic.”
In March, Mr. Blanco traveled to several states in his role as education ambassador. He spoke to the Monitor via video call after working with seventh and eighth graders at St. Martin’s Episcopal School in Atlanta.
His schedule in April, National Poetry Month, is busy as he promotes the academy’s Teach This Poem initiative, which uses primary sources and activities to help teachers bring poetry into the classroom. “Our belief is that poetry is not just for the English class – it’s for history, it’s for social studies, it’s also even for science,” he explains. “Poets write about everything.”
The interdisciplinary approach resonates with Mr. Blanco in part because he earned a degree in civil engineering from Florida International University (FIU) and worked as an engineer for 20 years. “I love knowledge of all kinds, and I was great at math. It was also a practical choice for an immigrant from a working-class family, something financially safe and secure. And I loved it,” he says.
Engineering taught him the importance of writing, he says, because his job required him to work with various communities and to write proposals, which serve as narratives of one’s vision for a project. “I just fell in love with language, and I saw, in real time, the importance of conveying ideas clearly … of using the right tone and word choice.”
After several years, Mr. Blanco wanted to try more creative writing and started drafting poems, “really bad poems, of course, because my sense of poetry was so archaic.”
He continued to work as an engineer, yet also took a workshop at a community college, where “my eyes opened up to contemporary voices and Latinx authors that I had never even known were writing poetry – people like me who had their own experiences of immigration and identity.”
He later earned a Master of Fine Arts degree (also from FIU) and began publishing books of poems and teaching writing at the university level.
His dual career tracks help him speak to STEM students of various ages who think they can’t understand poetry or that they lack creativity. “Engineers in particular don’t consider themselves creatives, and I try to show them that they are creators. ‘You build stuff that people use every day. … You created that beautiful streetscape.’”
Since his inauguration reading, Mr. Blanco has helped create space for people of many backgrounds to share their stories and to use poetry as a bridge for understanding. In addition to serving as education ambassador, he is also an associate professor at FIU and was appointed the first poet laureate of Miami-Dade County in 2022.
When asked about America’s current approach to immigration, he says, “It’s really sad that immigrants are being vilified because they are actually true patriots. My parents are more American than I could ever be, and my patriotism for this country comes through their eyes, through their experience and the sacrifices they’ve made. They’re eternally grateful for this country and uphold the values and the promises that we’ve been expounding since the founding of our country. And I think those diverse voices, whether in the context of an immigrant, a Latinx [person], or an immigrant of another kind, really remind America of its best.”
Poetry can build bridges across cultures, he says, because “poets take deep dives into things, and we question our assumptions a lot. We try to identify the questions we’re not asking. And since poetry is filtered through the personal lens, it often adds a real name, a real face, real smiles, real tears to things that are otherwise abstract.”
